Gemba Panta Rei

A reader e-mailed me a couple of days ago and said "I personally don't believe all problems can be solved by a group of workers gathered together doing Kaizen" and went on to make a convincing case that specialized knowledge is needed to solve technical problems and when there are multiple factors causing a problem a different approach is needed than kaizen. He made the point I have been trying to make for the last few postings on Industrial Engineering, Human Resource Development and Lean manufacturing.

Perhaps kaizen is a polarizing word. It's not a word native to English, and means different things to different people. The Wikipedia definition of kaizen is actually pretty good. By nature of a Wiki it's subject to editing and constant change so I can't say the definition you read will be the same one I read. The emphasis on respect for people, system thinking, process and results focus, as well as a blame-free approach are key characteristics to kaizen.

Whoever last edited this Wiki also felt it necessary to add "Kaizen" is the correct usage. "Kaizen event" or "kaizen blitz" are incorrect usage." Limited perhaps, but not necessarily incorrect. In the broadest sense kaizen is human creativity and innovation in solving problems. Whether we provide a product or a service, whether we sweep floors or sit in board rooms this is essentially what we go to work to do. Rapid improvement (kaizen event) teams are very effective, but should be combined with "soft" kaizen on a daily basis both as small, local, non-technical incremental improvement efforts and also as "hard" kaizen activity involving six sigma, DOE and 3P tools.

This week I have been generalizing the "hard vs. soft" or "human creativity vs. technical expertise" or "innovation vs. process" under umbrella categories of Industrial Engineering and Human Resource Development in order to make a point that two or more perspectives are necessary to succeed at Lean manufacturing.

I don't believe an organization should align itself too strongly with any one of kaizen teams, six sigma, Lean manufacturing, Industrial Engineering, suggestion systems, human resource development, TPM programs, material control systems, marketing & sales focus, financial models or any single solution. Balance is important.

I have a personal dislike of polarization and extreme viewpoints. It's a fairly strong dislike (you might even say polar, and I find this irony amusing). I am curious about the opposing viewpoint and I want to learn from others who have different experiences than I have. I have learned the hard way that finding harmony between seemingly opposing viewpoints is often the key to success. I've tried to make this point while discussing Industrial Engineering, Human Resource Development and their impact on the success Lean manufacturing.

We are being encouraged to attach ourselves to simple, even polarized positions by popular media and popular management literature. People respond to clear and simple messages that are repeated over and over rather than to complex, multi-part messages that require long attention spans and deep thought to fully grasp. This may be why titles such as Innovative Sales Leadership sell so well.

Read practically any recent author of a Lean manufacturing book wrapped around a particular theme (as opposed to a broad examination of TPS) and they will appear to be convinced that their approach is the answer and theirs is the unique and essential perspective missing from Lean today. People take an ownership over what they create, so this is no surprise. There is nothing wrong with simple and powerful ideas, as long as you have many of them.

I like Jim Collins' book Good to Great a lot. It's built around not one but seven simple and powerful ideas. It's a book that comes at the question of effective business management almost completely from the "soft" side, or the human resource development aspect. I fully agree with the importance his ideas on of the need for humility in a leader, the need to get the right people in an organization first, confronting the facts, having a culture of discipline, using technology to accelerate good processes, and getting alignment in the organization by having everyone push on the "flywheel" in one direction. If you've counted, that's six.

The one idea I have trouble with is the Hedgehog Concept. The contrast is between the wily fox that tries many tricks to catch the hedgehog but is always unsuccessful because the hedgehog knows one trick – roll up into a spiky ball so that the fox gets not a tasty mouthful of hedgehog but a painful mouthful of spikes. The point Mr. Collins makes is that you will be more successful if you can be the best at the world at one thing, be passionate about it, and have it make you money, rather than try to do too much and be unfocused.

The hedgehog is at risk of being road kill without the ability to lift his head, look around and consider that rolling up into a spiky ball may not work against all dangers (such as a passing truck). Passion is a very satisfying but subjective measure. "What you can be best in the world at" is difficult to gauge until you are actually the best, since it is a result and not a process. Even the "economic engine" is market-driven, so in the end you have very little control over any of these three elements.

Pursuing your passion, being successful and being recognized for it are wonderful things that people should strive for. But I think Mr. Collins is missing the Industrial Engineering aspect of leadership. Both "Confront the Brutal Facts" and "A Culture of Discipline" and "Technology Accelerators" can be seen as more technical aspects of leadership, but the author is reluctant to give these a name.

"A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at" Mr. Collins says in his book. He also says "Good is the enemy of great". In kaizen we say "the enemy of better is best". Although it seems wrong, kaizen thinking says people should not strive to be the best in the world at something, but to be better. Toyota is afraid of the complacency that comes with being the best and strives to be better.

From a practical standpoint and for the vast majority of people who are not business leaders, it is more valuable to ask "what can I be better at" than to ask "what can I be the best in the world at". Passion is important, but it can blind you to what is necessary. It can blind you to the other viewpoints. Passion is not rational or fact based.

"We should only do those things that we can get passionate about" writes Mr. Collins. That's the ideal. From an Industrial Engineering standpoint we should also only flow things one at a time paced to customer demand based on a pull signal. Most companies would go belly up if they followed this advice immediately. There is a lot that needs to happen to ready an organization before it can become a Lean enterprise or achieve the ideal.

We all have to do many things on a daily basis that we are not passionate about. Many of these things are necessary. The point is that we are most successful when our personal goals and interests are aligned with others in the team and those of the entire organization. It's a useful habit to ask "why?" many times and do kaizen whenever you find that you are not passionate about what you are doing. Remove the obstacles, frustrations, variables, and wastes that make you lose your passion or interest in what you are doing. It might seem odd to apply the scientific method to something as "soft" as passion, but kaizen is also about personal improvement as it is about business improvement.

The wild hedgehog listens only to itself (your passion, what you understand that you can be the best at) and is fortunate when these things have an overlap with what makes you money. The domesticated or tamed hedgehog is able to "confront the brutal facts" even about oneself, and perhaps take a different path to success.

Mr. Collins is against giving improvement initiatives a name, claiming that a program dies when named. Arguably the most successful automobile manufacturer in the world credits something named kaizen with its success. There are banners in the factory reminding people "Good Thinking, Good Products" among other slogans and named initiatives of the quarter. Perhaps the problems Mr. Collins' research team observed were not the risk of giving a good program a name and watching it die but having a bad program, named or not.

Tame the hedgehog. Name it kaizen.

Posted by Jon Miller at 8:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Leon Fok asked me a question today about the differences in Japanese and American management practices and how this affects their kaizen efforts. Leon is the Publications Coordinator at Gemba and has been with us a month. His question is relevant to this week's blogging theme of Industrial Engineering, Human Resource Development and their role in Lean manufacturing implementation.

Leon studied art and graphic design and has experience working at a printer. He knows only the first few things about Lean manufacturing and kaizen that we have been able to teach him through the orientation and daily work at Gemba. Leon emigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong and has traveled to several Asian countries. He knows very little about kaizen, but has learned enough about it to ask how effective and widespread it is outside of Japan.

I'll share and expand upon what we talked about in the drive back to the office for 45 minutes in Seattle traffic.

When people in the West talk about the failure of Lean transformations due to “leadership” or “management support” I believe it comes down to a failure in one of two areas, namely strategy and execution. Management can have a poor strategy, incomplete strategy, or one that is in conflict with the fundamental principles of a Lean operating system. An example of a conflict would be trying to realize productivity improvement savings through layoffs or pursuing Lean manufacturing primarily in the hope of making an impact on the opinions of the stock analysts in the short term future. The jury's still out but Merck appears to be in the throes of this.

The result of a poor or incomplete strategy can cause a company to do everything right from an Industrial Engineering standpoint but still go bankrupt. Some may implement only parts of Lean manufacturing that appear to suit their strategy for the moment. I attribute this to the short term planning of American business management (in contrast to the long-term policy and Hoshin-driven strategies of Japanese companies). While execution can be quicker in America, it may be execution of a strategy based on short term thinking.

Companies struggle with execution even when the strategy is good and aligned with the power of Lean. I have seen this as mostly due to a failure to link the Human Resources Development aspect of Lean transformation to the nuts and bolts Industrial Engineering, marketing, accounting and other "operating system" aspects. Execution over the long term requires properly training leaders in to their role of supporting the Lean operating system that they have installed.

Japanese companies develop generalists with firm-specific knowledge expertise while American firms value specialist managers who bring in ideas from the outside. For more on this, I've cited and summarized a Human Capital Institute article in this post. Most Japanese companies will start their new recruits in manufacturing, sales or other front-line roles regardless of what school or what degree they bring, while American firms hire and place people with trained-in skills to specific functional roles.

Traditionally Japanese managers tend to stay with their company for most or all of their career and progress through management by seniority rather than merit. The opposite tends to be true in America. There are negatives with having a company full of long-serving generalists, but the benefit of this combination is that the Japanese manager develops a very good understanding of the operating system of the company (Lean or not) and is able to pass it on to the next generation of managers.

By contrast, executives at American firms can come straight out of MBA schools (or via a stint at a consulting company after their MBA) with or without significant and relevant prior work experience in that company. They may know the Industrial Engineering portion of Lean manufacturing very well, but would have completely missed out on the HRD aspect making this knowledge native to the company over many years and transferring it to at least a second generation of leaders.

There are notable exceptions of American companies who have gone through the process of learning Lean manufacturing and teaching it as a business system to their people. Danaher is one. But I am talking about general differences that are true across the majority of companies in the two countries. This is a very important piece that is missing from the efforts of firms in the U.S. and other countries who are attempting to become Lean.

Executives need to go to gemba and know what to look for and how to contribute to the development of their people to support their operating system. Running the operating system and responding to problems that happen within it is the “firm specific knowledge” and very nearly the definition of Lean enterprise.

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Part of what started me thinking about Lean manufacturing, kaizen and the role of Industrial Engineering and Human Resource Development was an exchange on one of my favorite bloggers a reader a few weeks ago.

There were two themes in this exchange which I found most interesting. The first was "Does management get handed down from one generation to the next?" Blogger Bill Waddell insisted that organizations don't transfer management knowledge and reader Barry Huff insisted that they do. The second concerned the difference between Ford and Toyota systems, where Bill took the position that Toyota added very little to the Ford operating system other than kanban and SMED, while Barry took the position that Toyota’s quality approach in the form of jidoka was a unique innovation.

I saw this as another example of the Industrial Engineering (IE) vs. Human Resource Development (HRD) question for Lean manufacturing. I don’t want to box in either of these men into categories such as IE or HRD, but it they are taking Polar opposite positions on matters of Lean manufacturing that are more or less technical versus human in nature.

Industrial Engineering and implementing the best available operating system in your company (TPS) is essential for long-term success. Almost no amount of kaizen or good intentions will save you if you are married to an MRP-driven, batch & queue operation with traditional accounting practices. But IE alone is not sufficient for a Lean enterprise transformation.

Companies that implement Lean manufacturing yet fail to sustain their improvement or change the culture tend to be IE-focused, neglecting the HRD component of giving their people the education in problem solving, making decisions based on facts, and going to gemba to observe what is actually happening. Much the same can be said for six sigma focused initiatives.

Part of the role of HRD within a Lean manufacturing organization is to transfer management, production engineering and process control technology and knowledge to the next generation of leaders. Not only that, it is to keep this knowledge current and fresh even in the face of high employee turnover. The technical expertise may reside the minds of the experts, but how to maintain and transfer this knowledge is a key HRD role.

Today most of the transformational work of Industrial Engineering at Toyota has been done and the focus of kaizen at Toyota is on HRD. Granted there is a small team of experts refining and advancing their production system, and there are perhaps thousands of engineers taking cost out at the design level, but for the hundreds of thousands of non-technical people, HRD is they main connection to kaizen. The training at the management level on the use of A3 report problem solving and communication as well as the insistence that employees at all levels generate 1 implemented kaizen idea per month are examples of this.

The Jidoka idea is a good example of the potential risks of taking either the HRD or IE position but not both. Built-in quality can be seen from an engineering viewpoint as having error proofing devices, testing and checking processes, sensors, etc. to make sure defects are not created or passed on. This is absolutely essential. Asking people to be more careful does not work in preventing errors.

The true genius of Jidoka lies in the ability for the process to stop autonomously when an error occurs. “Intelligent Automation” or “Automation with a Human Touch” is how it is described at Toyota. If it is a manual process people stop the process. People need to be trained and ready to stop the process when an error occurs or there is risk of an error. This is very different from relying on downstream inspection processes that have been designed in.

Just in Time also must essentially blend IE and HRD aspects. Companies struggle or fail to implement Lean when they see JIT as only one thing, such as flow or where to carry inventory buffers. It is much more than that, including how to hire and cross-train people to be multi skilled, how material are designed, purchased, and lots are sized for one piece through SMED, how machines are right-sized in order to produce one-piece at takt using 3P, how quality is built-in so the lack of buffer does not create constant line stops due to poor quality, and only incidentally how they are placed in sequence so flow and pull becomes easier. When people specialize in creating cells or treating Lean manufacturing / JIT as primarily an IE exercise, they have only examined a part of the elephant.

As we look at the bigger picture and consider better ways to teach and do kaizen to make sure Lean transformations area sustained, sometimes we can be like the blind wise men describing an elephant. One wise man feels the trunk and says “it is a snake” another feels the ear and says “it is a leaf” another feels the leg and says “it is a tree”, etc. It does not change the fact that these are wise men, or that their research and observations are very valuable. We can only describe the elephant by touch (our expertise, or the area we are closest to) and once we think we are able to describe a part of the elephant very accurately we may lose interest in hearing the perspectives of the other wise men touching another part of the elephant.

One of these wise men is a good friend of ours who is a production control consultant. He sees everything as a material control problem, and he has the solutions. He is a very successful consultant, earning three quarters of a million dollars per year working for himself. He tells people how to integrate MRP with JIT. He is a trained Industrial Engineer, and very smart. But when people don’t get it, he doesn’t understand why. He’s a great if you want a bucket of fish, but not if you want to learn to fish for yourself.

One of the companies we like to visit in Japan literally turned their company around with the help of a consultant from a money losing and shrinking company to a profitable and growing company, through a fanatical application of 3S (five S minus two). It was a matter of people agreeing on what was needed and what was not needed, where everything should be located, and how things should be labeled. Everything was placed on wheels. Everyone sorts, straightens and sweeps every day. From an Industrial Engineering standpoint, they had some one-piece flow, SMED and kanban prior to the consultant arriving. But not until the human factor was made primary were they able to turn their business around and sustain the gains.

The lesson here is that taken to a high degree of completion, implementing even just one piece of the Lean manufacturing can take you a lot farther than implementing all of the Lean tools half way, and not providing the Human Resource Development to support this new operating system. It’s as if by cracking the genetic code from the elephant’s ear you are able to genetically describe the whole elephant.

The HRD part is not only a question of how to train the workforce to be problem solvers, supervisors to be coaches, etc. It is a more general issue of how do we train people to understand their operating system (TPS created through Industrial Engineering, accounting systems, management systems, etc) so that they can be empowered to improve it as well as solve problems as they occur within that system. This learning often starts at the gemba, and must spread to every corner of the organization from bottom to top.

Posted by Jon Miller at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ll be blogging on the theme of Lean manufacturing, Industrial Engineering and Human Resources Development this week. This is a topic that’s been on my mind for quite a while and it’s time some of it was written down.

Industrial Engineering (IE) and Human Resources Development (HRD) are two key aspects of Lean enterprise transformation and sustained kaizen over the long haul. I’ve noticed that sometimes these two can be at odds in terms of the practical approach companies take to implement Lean manufacturing.

Just today I had a discussion with one of our long-term clients about next steps in our Lean manufacturing consulting relationship. To make a long story short, Phase 1 of our relationship was almost pure IE work, involving lead-time and cycle time reduction through value stream mapping, time observation, etc. Phase 2 was almost pure HRD work focusing on training for all staff and kaizen events in all departments, Standard Work documentation and training (a blend of IE and HRD) with kaizen newspaper facilitation by supervisors. Phase 1 yielded more short-term results than Phase 2.

For the proposed Phase 3 they would like to go back to the IE focus. In fact what is needed is the application of Lean principles to how they measure, manage and plan their production. They could also benefit from busting out some walls that inhibit flow in the factory, and this is in fact a training issue at the executive level. It can be either Industrial Engineering or Human Resources Development over the short term, but two years into their Lean enterprise transformation, this client needs a deliberate blend of the two.

Eric Sander from Gemba gave a contribution to the Tips of the Trade section of our monthly newsletter this month in which he essentially said that when you are doing kaizen, if you follow the process and teach people how to see the wastes and how to remove them, you will succeed. In other words, as a consultant you do not need to have all of the answers or know the exact outcome of the project ahead of time.

Eric was a senior manufacturing manager at Hill-Rom and happens to have a degree in teaching. In the past year Eric has been involved projects as diverse as 3P for automotive stamping line design, Lean training at a construction company framing and building high-end homes, Lean transformatoin at a fiberglass bath tub manufacturer, and 5S at a manufacturer of residential cabinets. None of these industries are in Eric's main area of technical experience and expertise. Eric has succeeded not by superimposing his 30 years of manufacturing management experience on our clients, but by following the kaizen process.

At the other end of things, not too long ago I was working with Joe Jud on a Lean office project at one of our clients. Joe is one of our consultants. He has an Industrial Engineering background. This project placed Joe in a facilitation, training and conflict resolution role. There was no opportunity for Joe to pull out the stop watch. He was outside of his comfort zone at times but he did a great job.

As consultants, the longer we work with clients the more frequently we are asked to do something new, to apply Lean principles in a new area of their business. This may require a management coach and teacher (HRD) to be placed in process analysis and flow creation (IE) role requiring more of the skills classified as Industrial Engineering, or vice versa.

Brad Schmidt of Gemba likes to call this “throwing them to the lions”. It’s a Biblical reference to Daniel who was thrown in the lion’s den by the Romans but his faith kept him from being eaten by the lions. In a similar way, we need to have faith in the kaizen process which inherently combines both the IE tools and the HRD approach.

This is quite an effective way of pulling out of our consultants what they are truly capable of doing at the gemba. Instead of just reciting what they have learned over the years from their teachers or pointing at the projected images of Power Point slides on the wall, they must switch between the two styles, disciplines and approaches of IE and HRD.

As leaders working in a developing Lean enterprise, the executives, managers, supervisors and team leaders need to be not only problem solvers (IE) but also teachers (HRD). I will write more on this in the coming days.

Posted by Jon Miller at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Another embattled Japanese state-owned enterprise asked Toyota executives for help with kaizen yesterday. NHK (the national broadcasting corporation) has requested that Toyota send an official to join the board of directors of NHK.

Toyota said "yes" within 8 hours. Toyota agreed to provide an executive, who would retire to join the board and take an active role in doing kaizen at NHK. This is just the latest example of a promising trend towards Lean government in Japan.

The new airport in Nagoya was famously built on-time and under budget through a public-private partnership and under the watchful eye and direction of a Toyota executive. The post office in Japan also began practicing kaizen a few years ago under the coaching of a Toyota executive, and the Metropolitan Expressway Co. of Japan also has a Toyota executive serving as Chairman.

Toyota Chairman Hiroshi Okuda steps down after June, and he will likely take on a similar role in cleaning up Japanese government, perhaps even running for office.

Gemba is no Toyota, but if FEMA or any other embattled U.S. government office wants help with kaizen our team will happily provide volunteers in this effort to serve to our country.

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Last summer while teaching VSM and demonstrating one-piece flow at one of our client’s factories in southern China I was introduced to the General Manager. He shook my hand. He wasted no time. He had one urgent question for me:

“How do we sustain kaizen?”

It seemed like an easy enough question at the time. There are many reasons why kaizen does not sustain, and I like to think I’ve heard most of them and that I have ready answers to many of them. I gave him several of my ready answers, but none of them satisfied him. Listening more carefully, I discovered his problem.

In this particular case this General Manager’s concern was about the instability of the workforce. Most of the workforce is young, and turnover at all levels is as high as 20%. This is simply due to the fact that the area is booming and there is always a slightly more well-paying job down the street.

For those of you who fear Chinese manufacturing, pay attention, as this is one of the major weaknesses of Chinese manufacturing long-term. For those of you who have manufacturing sites in China this is something you should pay attention to as well.

Specific remedies to this factory's problems included stabilizing the turnover through control of factors that were within their control. These had mostly to do with their current hiring practices and policies on how shifts were set. In the mid-term, implement work cells with longer cycle times instead of the maddeningly high speed high volume lines improved productivity, requiring less hiring and training, since fewer people were needed to do the same work. Cold, but in this case necessary to stabilize the situation for the majority.

Finally, in the long term we had to emphasize the value of worker morale and job enrichment on reducing turnover. Although by far the number one motivator for these workers is money, by hiring a demographic with slightly different values and building a work environment that is attractive to these workers, this company will address rampant turnover.

But this particular General Manager's question has been dogging me for months. I've seen variations of it come up several times since then and I'm detecting a pattern. It's more than how to make kaizen sustain in a high turnover environment, it's about how to make sure everyone who you hire is fully versed in the fact that kaizen is part of their job from day one.

A few months ago I visited a friend who is a Lean Manager at a local vehicle assembly factory. They are facing a similar problem. This company is more Lean than most companies in the Puget Sound. They are competing successfully internationally by designing processes and products using Lean principles. They spend time at the end of each day having team meetings within each value stream work on kaizen action items. They have a genuine kaizen culture starting to bloom in this Petri dish of a factory.

But every time they bring in new hires (and this is almost weekly as a growing company) this is like adding distilled water to the Petri dish, diluting the solution and threatening to kill the culture. The new people are selected for their mechanical skills rather than their demonstrated willingness to learn and be a part of a highly performing team. There is no process within the human resource function to screen for or inject the necessary kaizen mindset to these new workers.

The questions my friend asked me were "How do we get them to see it?" as in "them" = the new workers, and "it" = kaizen. Also "How to get supervisors to coach?" and "How do we get them to take the thinking with them when they leave?"

My friend's frustration led him to comment "If they don’t learn it then we might as well just give them orders and have them leave their brain at the door, since we are not increasing the net amount of Lean thinking in the world anyway."

Today one of our consultants came back from visiting a customer and they were facing the identical challenge. This client's solution was to hire two people with curriculum development expertise to work alongside the Lean experts to develop training and orientation materials that would be used as the hiring process to ensure that new team members would very quickly be highly functional in a dynamic environment doing kaizen. I am eager to see how well this works.

In the last week or so I have come across several articles on the how Toyota places high value on people and training. Expanding overseas forced Toyota to learn how to communicate, teach their values and methods. By all accounts they have been extremely successful, though challenges remain as the labor troubles in India show. Toyota has also been wise in selecting locations for their factories in a way that has by and large supported the training and culture development goals. The Chronicle Herald article talks about their wise use of Texas state funds for training and how this may be raising awareness at the state level for the need to support this type of training in order to attract business.

The article Toyota Training Key to Consistency praises the hands-on learning approach and the teaching that Toyota does at the Global Production Center. This article ran in the London Free Press (London, Ontario, not far from Detroit). It is a shortened version of the original article that hit the AP.

Read the full article at Centre Daily. The tone of some of the comments by the Japanese quoted in the latter half of the article (cut out by the London Free Press) are very direct, bordering on arrogant.

The following quote may be an example of Toyota executives buying a bit too much into their own mystique:

Explicit training wouldn't have been needed if Toyota cars were being produced only in Japan because workers would have picked it up naturally "like air," said Executive Vice President Mitsuo Kinoshita.

The following comment, and final note in the article is a variation on what I've head stated at Toyota as "We don't write it [TPS thinking] down because we want people to learn it by experience."

"This may also apply to a U.S. company's methods, but it's impossible to state everything in a pamphlet. That's your know-how - something that can't be expressed in words," he said. "If all it took was a manual, anyone could manage a company."

For those of us concerned with making kaizen culture a reality in our organizations, this is worth thinking deeply about.

Posted by Jon Miller at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In this chapter Taiichi Ohno explains the origin and the conditions that resulted in the development of the kanban system at Toyota. In the beginning the machining process upstream would replenish what the assembly process downstream used. The kanban card was used as a production instruction ticket. It was still upstream push, based on a kanban order card.

The machining processes faced challenges of large lot sizes and long lead-times in order to respond to the downstream pull. Machine changeover times kept the process from being responsive. In order to deliver just in time - the quantity of what the customer wants when they want it - single minute changeovers became necessary.

Back in those days single minute changeovers were not a reality. Nobody was doing it. The workers did not believe it was possible. It seemed even illogical and risky, not something that responsible management would permit a factory manager to experiment with.

Today we have many success stories of Lean manufacturing and SMED is a standard part of the curriculum of many industrial engineering or operations management programs. Even today people fear change and think single minutes is impossible. Imagine what Ohno must have felt like 50 years ago trying to do something that had never been done.

Taiichi Ohno says that he was scared, and that many people thought that his efforts could lead the company to bankruptcy, but that he was convinced that this was what was needed for Japanese automobile manufacturing to turn a corner.

Until 1961 or 1962, the Toyota Production System was not named as such. It was the Ohno System. This is because it was a risky experiment, and Ohno's name was on it, not Toyota's. At the same time Taiichi Ohno fully credits the Toyota executives for having the courage to support his efforts.

Before the oil shock in 1973 productivity improvement was relatively easy because the industry was living in the world of mass production. Toyota only had to increase output with the same people in order to improve productivity. Several chapters of Gemba Keiei are dedicated to the discussion of "reduced volume production" and its challenges. This is because that is the world in which the Toyota Production System was born.

The thinking behind Just in Time led to the development of the kanban system. In those days (and still at many companies today) the "common sense" was for the producer process to deliver the parts downstream. By reversing this so that the downstream process had to go get the parts they wanted, Just in Time was achieved. "There was nothing difficult or challenging about this" says Ohno. It was just turning common sense around.

In those days people thought Just in Time was an ideal, and not something that could be achieved in practice. This was common sense. Ohno says that he turned this common sense around because it was part of his personality to look at things from different perspectives. He was often scolded as a child for this, but it helped him go beyond common sense and see things differently.

Taiichi Ohno says that being the final assembly manager was good education for him because it allowed him to see the folly of the push production system from the final point downstream. Various departments would proudly say they achieved their monthly targets for engines, frames, etc. but without enough steering wheels Ohno's assembly lines couldn't build cars. The upstream push into the warehouse was not helping Ohno run the assembly lines, so he went beyond common sense and took a backwards look at the situation, arriving at downstream pull.

Ohno started working on the Kanban system in mid 1950s. Back then he was in charge of final assembly, machining, and stamping factories. Another manager was responsible for forging, casting and heat treating. This limited the kanban system to operate between assembly and machining and also assembly and stamping. Only in 1962 when all departments were placed under Ohno was the Motomachi factory able to run a complete kanban system.

It was not easy to ask another manager to manage their production according to a kanban system, so the kanban system developed one section at a time. The suppliers were included in the kanban system at the very end "to minimize confusion to our suppliers". Ohno gives an example of another Toyota manager who caused problems for a supplier who was forced onto a kanban system even before the Motomachi factory at Toyota had succeeded with kanban. Ohno makes a strong statement that you should not implement a kanban system with your suppliers before you have successfully implemented the kanban system in-house. This is advice that is seldom heeded today.

This somewhat explains why my Japanese teachers, themselves students of Ohno, insisted to American companies that they should not rush to implement kanban. “You are not ready” they would say. Years before kaizen and Lean manufacturing was properly understood (are we there yet?) kanban was a buzzword in U.S. manufacturing, and misunderstanding of kanban systems persist today.

It seems not a week goes by when a press release touts one or another software vendor as the market leader in digital kanban for advancing Lean manufacturing implementations. I fear that few of these are much more than a way of coercing suppliers to submit to a supply chain scheme that burdens them with inventory management. Almost none of these firms sell software that enables production kanban and withdrawal kanban in-house. Too few of these software companies could show you an implementation site where production kanban triggered production upstream and withdrawal kanban were used for downstream pull. Even fewer could show you sites where kanban is used as a tool of continuous improvement, instead of a supply chain hammer with dubious long-term benefits.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but it's important to understand the thinking behind the process that is being automated or digitized. The same can be said for the kanban system.

Posted by Jon Miller at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the informal definitions of Lean manufacturing is "doing more with less". A Puget Sound Business Journal article titled Throw Out Less Food and Help the Less Fortunate made a lot of sense to me. It maps out some practical steps to achieving Lean food service and social good.

The article reports that according to research done by University of Arizona anthropologist Timothy Jones, about one-third of the Seattle's residential waste and nearly 30% percent of commercial waste is food that is still edible.

This is clearly huge Muda (waste) since we are spending money and energy buying and making food, and then throwing some of it away. Like Taiichi Ohno said, overproduction is the greatest of the 7 wastes. It creates more of the other 6 wastes by generating unnecessary acitivity and consumes vital production resources and raw materials.

According to the article Americans throw away $100 billion worth of edible food each year. That's $344 for every one of the 290 million Americans, or just under a dollar per day per person in food we throw away. At the same time, the article reports that food banks struggle with shortfalls of food exceeding 1,000 pounds per week.

The cost to dispose of this food in landfills for the city of Seattle was $6 million in 2004. Why not stop this waste and spend the money on something better?

The anthropologist Mr. Jones has worked with Seattle restaurants to determine the average amount that people ate, and reduced the portion sizes accordingly. Extra food was provided to customers on request, for free. This saved restaurants cost (raw materials, disposal of excess) and also allowed them to contribute to food banks.

In the early 1990s when I was traveling full-time as a kaizen interpreter it didn't take me longer than about two weeks of eating American portions at restaurants to figure out that I would eat myself to death if I kept it up. I grew up on fish and rice, so maybe I'm not typical. I cut back on portion sizes and lived to tell the tale.

What can we do to achieve Lean food service, and cut back on this ridiculous waste of food in America? Here I'll invoke Taiichi Ohno again and say "Cut it in half." Cutting your portion size in half and consuming what you want "just in time" by asking for seconds is a far more Lean and waste-free method than accepting the push-overproduction that is common in American food service today.

Ask a weight-loss expert who is not peddling a book, a packaged food product or exercise machine and they will tell you is that you can eat whatever you like, whenever you like, as long as you cut your portion sizes. I'm not qualified to give out medical advice, but this is a kaizen on my health that's worked for over a decade of travel and eating out. Lean transformation in manufacturing, food service or in personal health is a matter of developing new habits for cutting out waste every day.

Posted by Jon Miller at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A continuous improvement specialist from a UTC group company e-mailed us today with the question “What principles should I look to implement for Job Shop Kaizen?” Kaizen in a job shop should aim to implement the same principles as in a shop that mass produces widgets, or in a clinic that treats patient. Namely, all of them.

All Lean principles apply in all processes to a greater or lesser degree, eventually. This is not a very helpful answer to our friend from UTC who is asking “What should I do first?” or “What do I do next?” in a job shop. The answer depends on what one means by “job shop”. Presumably, things in a job shop are a whole lot different than in a volume production shop.

Gemba Research is a kaizen consulting company that started out in the Northwest. It's a nice place to live but not exactly the manufacturing hub of the United States. What we lack in automotive manufacturing we make up for in aerospace to some extent in our neck of the woods. There are quite a number of small firms locally that fall into the job shop category as well. Much of our early work teaching Lean manufacturing and kaizen was with job shops.

One of our first clients was a job shop that made custom upholstered furniture based on third party designers, with order sizes ranging from one to fifty. By asking “What will make us money?” early on we identified lead-time reduction as a good way to prioritize Lean implementation and ultimately cost reduction. The biggest impact with Lean manufacturing came from everyone recognizing the 7 wastes in everything that they do and in starting a disciplined approach to getting rid of waste using kaizen newspaper meetings. Dividing up what were formerly one-person jobs into multi-stage flow, regardless of lot size, has helped wastes become visible in the factory. Efforts at 5S have started more recent at this company. They are developing standard procedures for dissimilar products with similar components and creating a training library to support this.

At another extreme, we worked with several job shop printers who set up and ran tens of thousands of units for each unique print run job. They called themselves a job shop. For these companies set up time reduction and Total Productive Maintenance focused on OEE improvement was important to create capacity without adding fixed assets. Each order required a new layout for the binding area, so the supervisors and team leaders needed to understand Just In Time and Standard Work very well so they could design a good layout to fulfill each new order efficiently.

One of our clients is a prosthetics (artificial limbs) clinic where each “job” is a unique limb designed and fitted to an individual person, referred individually from area hospitals. They never make the same thing twice. Yet they read The Toyota Way, saw how it all applied to them and they are now striving to establish Standard Work.

Another small client manufactured and installed railings. They worked for architects or general contractors and were essentially a construction crew with chop saws and welders in a garage. Each project used different materials, looked different, went together differently, and had unique challenges of installation at million dollar properties under the watchful eyes of finicky customers. Yet they essentially chopped, fitted and bolted on railings week after week.

Back when it seemed like almost every client was a job shop or custom manufacturer we used to joke that one day we’d walk into a factory stamping out thousands of identical widgets and the client would tell us “We’re not like Toyota. Everything we do is different.”

Today we have one client that is a global consumer electronics manufacturer. They produce tens of millions of units of their products each year. They have perhaps 40 to 50 active products at any one time. Each of these products does basically the same thing. All products follow essentially the same process. Almost the first thing out of their mouthes was “We have so much variation. Everything we do is different.” Laugh out loud.

All value added manufacturing processes fall into one of three categories of activity. In a manufacturing process energy is used to 1) add atoms (packing, assembly, welding, painting, plating, etc.), 2) remove atoms (cutting, drilling, milling, etching, etc.) or 3) reposition atoms (forging, casting, molding, bending, etc.). The process of how each manufacturer does one of these three things for each of their product is only as complex as they choose to design it to be. Toyota has just cut $1.2 billion from their manufacturing cost in their last fiscal year because of their understanding of the impact of process design on cost. Manufacturers are only as different as they will themselves to be.

So whether you are a job shop or not, whether your business is unique or not really doesn’t matter in the end. It’s just a question of which excuses you allow yourself to make for not doing kaizen. If you don’t have a process, define it and standardize it. If you have a defined process, improve it. The steps of observing the current condition, identifying the waste, sketching out the desired condition and applying the tools and principles of TPS to take out the waste are the same everywhere.

But here’s the twist: as a consulting company, each of our customers makes a different product. Their processes are different. The people are different. Their customers are different. They are located in cities and countries with climates, languages and laws that are different. Where we start and the sequence of events we follow to most effectively save money, develop people and make kaizen stick is different each time. We never work with the “same” client twice.

So... did I just prove or disprove my point?

Posted by Jon Miller at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO. These days innovation seems to be the trump card of executives and politicians who have grown bored with operational excellence. So I picked up this best-seller with great interest, from my public library. The first chapter made me chuckle.

I chuckled because after all the fuss about innovation being the way of the future, the guru on innovation starts out his book by espousing an ancient Lean manufacturing tenet: go to gemba.

The author attacks the "Devil's advocate" in a way that makes me suspect the author harbors some deep personal trauma with having a precious idea shot down. He describes the "ten faces" of innovation that can be used to effectively counter the Devil's advocate and nurture all ideas. The first "face" or personality is The Anthropologist.

An anthropologist observes people in their environments in order to understand them. The Anthropologist face of innovation is essentially about watching how customers interact with products and services in order to better understand unspoken needs or ways in which new products and services can be delivered.

It's wonderful that this best-selling author starts out the book about coming up with new ideas by telling people to "go to gemba" and observe the process of the customer using the product or service. Just think, he could have told the world that the way to have great ideas is to stay within hushed cubicles with high walls in perfect concentration on the notion that's already in your head. Instead he gives examples to demonstrates the kaizen principle of "go to gemba" applied to product development and idea generation. We named our consulting company Gemba Research because this practice is so effective.

By explaining how he came to see the wisdom of using social anthropologist skills as part of market research the author is freely admitting that he has seen the wisdom of coming down from the ivory tower domain of ideas to the world of actual people and actual things. Genchi gembutsu. I can't wait to see what I can learn about kaizen from the rest of this book on innovation.

Posted by Jon Miller at 8:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Taiichi Ohno starts out the chapter not quite having left the themes of his last two chapters behind. He describes how the jidoka idea that came from the Toyota textile business led to one operator running 20 or 30 machines. This thinking was transferred to the automotive side of Toyota's business, resulting in one machine operator running more than 10 machines toward the goal of ten-fold productivity improvement. Taiichi Ohno gives credit to this concept being the very foundation of the Toyota Production System.

At this half-way point in the book I am convinced that this book is not one he intentionally set out to write about what is "Workplace Management" but instead a collections of the ideas, stories and wisdom of Taiichi Ohno. These "chapters" were probably titled by an editor at JMAM who read through the chapters, found the theme and gave each chapter its title. Or maybe it's just that one page from the previous chapters was accidentally slipped into this one.

The second paragraph in the chapter abruptly begins discussing the origin of the supermarket system at Toyota. "Back in 1951 or 1952, one of my classmates who was the first one of us to go to America brought back many color photographs which he showed us in a slideshow." The supermarket was such a novelty that Ohno's classmate had taken several pictures of them. Ohno was struck by the efficiency of having people walk around with their own shopping carts to pick what they wanted and then go to the check out lady when they were ready to buy. When Toyota began doing downstream pull in 1952-1953 they called it the supermarket system.

"Rather than call it the Ohno System or the Ohno Line, calling it the Supermarket System made people accept it easier. Japanese were suckers for anything with an English name in those days." People also saw that the idea of customers getting what you needed when you needed it was exactly like the just in time concept. The downstream process could take only as much material as they had money to buy or only as much as they had a place to store it. This was the most economical and productive method, according to Ohno.

Traditionally groceries were either delivered to your home or bought at a produce stand supplied by another distributor. This might seem convenient for the customers but it actually raised the cost, says Ohno. For example, the tofu maker would make fresh tofu and walk around with his cart blowing his flute to let people know it was available. The tofu was very fresh and delivered to your door. However if tofu was very popular in your neighborhood that day then he might run out before you could buy any, and your miso soup would be without tofu. This was not so convenient for the customer.

Customers drive to the supermarket when they want to buy something. This may seem to be less customer-focused than the direct delivery to the home. However in fact people who wanted two leeks would have to buy an entire bunch of leeks. To make it worth the delivery person's effort they would also order a daikon radish. So customers ended up buying more and spending more than they needed right now and this was less economical.

Taiichi Ohno relates this to the factory. Often the producer (upstream) process delivers parts downstream and thinks they are providing a service when in fact they are pushing material and making the assembly area less efficient. Ohno says that converting from push to pull can easily triple productivity. Just in time (takt, flow, pull) lets you know what you need to produce, since what the next process takes away is what they need.

Posted by Jon Miller at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The more I visit companies the more I realize how profoundly lacking most of them are in the area of documented standards and procedures, to say nothing of Standard Work. As one of the cornerstones of the Toyota Production System, Standard Work (also Standardized Work) is very different from standardization or work standards. Standard Work is a very exacting thing. It is typically represented on a Standard Work Sheet showing the layout, material flow, people and inventory as well as quality and safety checkpoints, and the Standard Work Combination Sheet showing the steps for one person to complete one cycle of work and all associated manual, walk, wait and automatic times.

The definition of Standard Work is "the most effective combination of manpower, materials and machinery". Standard Work is the method, and thereby you have the four Ms of manufacturing (manpower, material, machinery, methods). Standard Work is only "the most effective" until the standard is improved. This is done through a continuous process called kaizen.

There are three elements to Standard Work for a repetitive process. They are 1) takt time, 2) work sequence and 3) standard work in process. For a process that does not repeat or is too variable it may not be possible to establish Standard Work according to these conditions (takt time is not meaningful, work sequence varies, Standard WIP varies). In this case, eliminating the variability or standardizing the process and creating a repetitive flow is the first step in kaizen.

Ultimately all work you do is the same, and when you understand this deep Zen of Lean everything else you do will become much easier, though the pace of change will seem to slow down in your new awakened state.

If you are scratching your head at this point and wondering what I could possibly be talking about it's a pretty good sign that you have huge opportunities at your company by implementing Standard Work. As I said above, it's similar but very different than having standardization, work standards, or standardized work instructions.

The two requirements for working in a truly Lean enterprise are 1) follow standard work, and 2) find a better way. There must be more to it than that, I hear you say, and you are right. For most of us who lack Standard Work, there certainly is more. First we need to establish the standards. Then we need to train people to these standards. Then we need to audit and verify that these standards are being followed.

I had a chance to reflect on Standard Work recently. I was visiting a customer site where two of our consultants were at the gemba. They were doing fine work helping the client to establish and document Standard Work. But as I was looking at the Standard Work documentation they had developed, my mind did a funny thing and asked "Where is the Standard Work procedure for consultants at Gemba?"

Although most of the people at Gemba have spent a significant amount of time working in factories, Gemba is not a manufacturing company. We can't claim to be the peers of our clients or know exactly how it feels to implement Lean manufacturing. We do try to apply as many of the philosophies and disciplines of Lean and kaizen as we can to our own company. Yet as vital and fundamental as Standard Work is, we are as guilty as our clients in making excuses when it comes to committing the resources to establishing and living by it.

I am hereby making a renewed personal commitment to establishing Standard Work at Gemba. Perhaps I will let you know how it goes.

Posted by Jon Miller at 1:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)

As Lean manufacturing and “Lean fill-in-the-blank” take root in mainstream business consciousness I am noticing more mention of “lean government” by politicians in sound bytes as well as press releases and articles. I’m afraid that to many people Lean government means something similar to the dreaded “lean and mean” or “lacking resources to pay for basic services”.

So what is a Lean government?

Singaporean Consultant Jian-Chieh Chew takes an operational excellence approach to this question and outlined his Eight Workable Strategies for Creating Lean Government. Mr. Chew’s eight points are:

No. 1 – Synchronization to Customer Demands
No. 2 – Understand Variations in Customer Demand
No. 3 – Create Work Cells
No. 4 – Eliminate Batching Work and Multi-Tasking
No. 5 – Enforce First in, First out
No. 6 – Implement Standardized Work and Load Leveling
No. 7 – Do Today's Work Today
No. 8 – Make the Value Stream Visible

While Mr. Chew does a great job of explaining Lean transaction, it falls short of defining Lean government. Saying that processing information or serving customers one at a time in a flow synchronized to demand is Lean government would be like saying that having everyone working on an assembly line from call to cash in a manufacturing organization is the definition of a Lean enterprise. There’s simply more to it than that.

Perhaps in Singapore they do not have the type of government as we do in the U.S. with lawmakers who attempt spend tax payer money building bridges to nowhere. If you have a government that is free of these types of boondoggles then focusing on Lean transactions in the various ministries and offices may be a sufficient definition of Lean government.

But I am looking at the question of “What is Lean government?” from the perspective of the staggering basket of boondoggle that is the U.S. government. It’s a bigger target, so my definition of Lean government has to work harder. A Lean government is one that will:

1) Solve people’s problems based on facts, by using the scientific method
2) Provide the highest quality of life to as many people as possible
3) Do this at the lowest cost
4) Do this as quickly as possible
5) Do this in a way that is sustainable beyond your tenure in government

Lean government is improving quality, cost, and delivery through kaizen.

Kaizen is about getting rid of waste, burden and variability in all of their forms. The U.S. government is the number one source of waste in the world. Why do I say this? The United States has the largest economy in the world. It has the largest tax base and collects the most taxes. It spends not only these taxes, but also what it can borrow from other governments (!!). Much of the spending is waste. We are the champions of the world when it comes to government waste. It is shameful, but it is also a tremendous opportunity.

Lean government needs to address waste at both a strategic level (which pain should we relieve first?) and at a logistical level (how can we deliver the most relief as quickly and cost effectively as possible?). In our economy there are thousands of trained professionals who every go to work every day to solve exactly these types of problems. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have sufficient numbers of them at the top of the U.S. government to make a significant difference.

Lean government is not about how civil servants or political leaders come to power. In the United States we have something fairly close to direct elections. In other countries there are monarchies. Neither system is inherently more or less wasteful. Common sense would suggest that a system of direct elections would do a better job of making sure that the customers’ voice (the will of the electorate) was reflected in policy and spending. Yet there have been benevolent dictatorships in history, as well as diastrous examples of popular rule.

Lean government is not about a balanced budget. Businesses also carry debt. Businesses take risks, shoulder debt and strike out in bold new directions from time to time. Governments are not too different in this way. Governments invest in infrastructure (build roads, airports), identify demographic trends (what the population will need in the future) and craft policy based on some combination of facts, faith and will of those being governed. The key is to do this with minimum waste and where there will be maximum effectiveness.

Lean government is not replacing the human capacity for making decisions with one strictly based on numbers. But a Lean government would certainly be more fact based than the faith-based Presidency we enjoy in the United States today. By their own admission facts come in a distant second to faith in today’s administration. I don't know how to do kaizen without facts. I admire people who do.

In the absence of facts, I go with faith. In the presence of facts that do not agree with faith, I question the facts. But I generally regret it when I ignore the facts. It takes a kind of faith to rely on the facts that are presented to you when making decisions. A Lean government would learn from the factual results of these decisions, good or bad.

Economist Milton Friedman said “the business of business is to do business” or to make money in a sustainable way. The business of government is to redistribute wealth (tax and spend) for the maximum good of the maximum number of people in a sustainable way. A Lean government should do this as effectively as possible. That means doing it rapidly with low transaction costs while strategically avoiding boondoggles, also known fondly in my country as pork.

What can we do about achieving a Lean government? We can take one lesson from another not-so Lean government. Edson Oda from Gemba’s Brazil office had to make a visit to a government office in Sao Paulo recently to explain why he hadn’t voted last October. He was out of the country on a business trip. Manuel Fernandez from Gemba, who lives under the slightly Leaner government of Chile will tell you that if you fail to vote on Election Day in that country you’ll get a visit from the police. They will ask you if you have a reason why you were not able to vote. They care, because you should.

What’s the lesson here? Citizens are the customers of government. Those of us who are eligible to vote have the privilege of letting our voice be heard. If we don’t define value for the government, how can we criticize the government for being wasteful? But mandatory voting would probably be too much intrusion into the precious individual freedoms of the American citizen. So for now we’ll just have to chop away at the branches of government waste.

Posted by Jon Miller at 11:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Taiichi Ohno recounts when he first learned in 1937 that the American worker was 9 times more productive than the Japanese worker. Taiichi Ohno heard this from a Mitsubishi Electric factory manager who had recently returned from a tour of Germany and America. The 300 person factory in Germany had three times the output of a Japanese factory. The American factory that the factory manager had visited had three times the productivity of the German factory. The American factory was therefore was 9 times more productive than the Japanese.

In those days Japanese used production equipment built in America or Europe. The difference in equipment immediately after World War II may have caused a large gap in productivity, but this was before World War II when the Japanese had heavily invested in foreign technology. One can imagine Taiichi Ohno scratching his head, thinking “There must be another reason.”

The GHQ of the American occupying forces announced that American productivity was 8 times greater than Japanese productivity. Since this number was an average across industries, and American automobile manufacturing is a leading industry they must be more productive, thought Ohno, and concluded that the goal was to improve productivity ten-fold. How can we possibly improve productivity ten-fold? It was this question over many years that drove Taiichi Ohno to develop the Toyota Production System.

At that time (and perhaps even now) no one was approaching productivity improvement with a goal of 100% to 1000%. It was not as if you could go to see Ford and GM and copy what they were doing and catch up right away. Taiichi Ohno says, “We needed to totally change our thinking. That was the spark that led to the Ohno System.”

Back in those days the final assembly factory at Toyota had a conveyor. The old-timers in the assembly section all had been taught by Kiichiro Toyoda that just in time was the best way for parts to assemble. However in reality the parts were delivered when completed, so that engines would be brought to the assembly when they had been built, but there would not be enough steering wheels. As a result there was an “intermediate warehouse” with lots of parts but not much that you could assemble into a finished automobile.

The production signal was not managed so each department would build and deliver on their own schedule. It was not until the 17th or 18th of the month that the final assembly would have enough to begin putting cars together. They did 30 days’ work in 10 days, so they needed 3 times as many people. If heijunka could be used to smooth out the mix and volume of production perhaps one-third of the people could do the same work, thought Taiichi Ohno.

By producing and delivering parts just in time so that parts needed arrived when they were needed it was actually easy to improve productivity by 300%. After that was done, looking more carefully at the process and finding ways to do kaizen, it was not hard to increase the productivity to 500% improvement from the beginning.

Taiichi Ohno explains that the workers in the assembly area felt they were being worked harder, but that this was a misconception. Assembly work is very labor intensive and when one-third of the people achieved the same output they concluded they must be working harder. In fact the assembly line was often stopped as there were no parts to assemble. People tended to keep busy doing other things. People confused “motion” with “work”. This is common even today.

One of the quirks of the Japanese language is that many times subject of the sentence or the verb can be left out. It is up to the reader to fill in the blank or understand from context what is being said. The title of this chapter does not make it clear whether the goal was or the goal is to improve productivity ten-fold. You have to answer that question for yourself.

Posted by Jon Miller at 10:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)